Where to find the brain’s ‘happiness center’

Living in a metropolis, Hong Kong people constantly suffer from stress and anxiety. Some people relieve it by doing entertaining activities or sports. Some indulge themselves in alcohol or even drugs for a rush of guilty pleasure, but the addiction would be detrimental.

What is happiness? Thanks to significant advancements in the fields of psychiatry and neuroscience, scientists have been able to locate “the happiness center” — a certain part of the brain that is linked to feeling happy. The participant would experience a thrill, or emotionally understand it as a state of contentment, when the brain cells of this particular area are stimulated.

Related neuroscientific research was conducted as early as the 1960s in which researchers from the California Institute of Technology found that monkeys and rats would keep hitting certain buttons which would create electrical stimulations via microelectrodes onto certain parts of their brains. They would even ignore those buttons that would reward them with food.

The scientists thus suggested that such electrical stimulations were mostly preferred as they could generate the most intense pleasure.

That said, let me add deep brain stimulation (DBS), a neurosurgical procedure in which the neurosurgeon uses a neurostimulator that sends electrical impulses through implanted microelectrodes to specific targets in the brain for the treatment of movement and neuropsychiatric disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and obsessive-compulsive disorder, etc.

For patients with severe depression, deep brain stimulation of the subgenual cingulate gyrus — at the medial aspect of the cerebral cortex — would be applied to help relieve symptoms of the illness and enhance the efficacy of other conventional treatments for depression.

However, the exact neuroanatomical targets and clinical outcomes of deep brain stimulation treating severe depression are yet to be confirmed.

The rule of law in Hong Kong has come under severe and imminent threat in recent years as opposition politicians have been trying to place their own political “perceptions” above our legal profession, our...

Two Hong Kong men were rescued from a mountain in central Hokkaido in Japan over the weekend after they landed themselves in trouble during a ski expedition. The skiers, aged 45 and 57, were rescued...

The first phase of the HK$36 billion Central-Wan Chai Bypass and Island Eastern Corridor Link (CWB) opened on Sunday after nearly nine years of construction, the Hong Kong Economic Journal reports. The 4.5-kilometer highway, including...

Technology and the economy are much intertwined nowadays. In December, I attended two conferences on economic trends and prospects for technology. One was the Hong Kong Economic Summit 2019 organized by Hong Kong Economic...

A Hong Kong court on Thursday sentenced two women to jail after they pleaded guilty to a charge of mistreating a four-year-old girl who had been in their care. District Court judge Ho Chun-yiu handed...

Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor rolled out a fresh package of welfare benefits for senior citizens who will be affected by the government’s decision to raise the age requirement for eligibility under the Comprehensive...

The Office of the Government Chief Information Officer (OGCIO) said last week that over 80 government bureaus and departments had published their first annual open data plans before the end of 2018. Another 650...